1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a program selecting method of selecting a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a viewer retrieves a desired television (TV) program from a group of TV programs which are presently being broadcasted, the most-familiar and frequently-used method is a method of selecting a channel by using an up/down key or ten keys of a remote controller to find a program while directly viewing programs. In the channel selection with the up/down key, the retrieval order is the order of channels. In the channel selection with the ten keys, a channel is assigned to each of the keys, so that the retrieval order is an order of selection of the ten keys by the viewer. The viewer finds a desired program by using any of the methods (hereinbelow, this operation will be called “zapping”).
In recent years, because of digitalization of broadcasting, the number of viewable programs is increasing. For the viewers, it provides an advantage that the number of interesting programs increases. On the other hand, however, the zapping operation has a problem such that a complicated operation is necessary to find a desired program. In zapping using the up/down key, when the number of channels increases, the number of operations required for zapping increases. In zapping using the ten-key pad, although an operation similar to conventional one can be performed to select any of the channels assigned to the keys, in the case of zapping channels which are not assigned to the keys, a complicated operation has to be performed. Another method of finding a program is a method using an EPG (Electronic Program Guide). The EPG usually has a simple sorting function and is suitable for finding a program in some aspects. However, since the EPG is a method of retrieving mainly characters, for viewers who find a program by a conventional method of viewing mainly pictures, it cannot be always the that the method is easy to use.
In such circumstances, a zapping method with the up/down key, in which the user's preference is reflected, is proposed. According to the method, preference of a viewer is estimated from history information of programs viewed by the viewer, and is used for zapping. Specifically, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open (JP-A) No. 2000-253325 discloses a method of setting the order of selection to not the order of channels but the order of programs from the highest preference of the viewer. If the preference of the viewer is accurately reflected in the order, the viewer can relatively easily find a desired program by an operation similar to conventional one.
The method is effective since the viewer can relatively easily access a desired program by conventional zapping operation also in the environments of multiple channels. On the other hand, the conventional zapping method using mainly pictures still has some problems. One of the problems is that at the time of selecting a program again from a group of zapped programs, it is not easy to identify the program by viewing pictures. This happens because the viewer tries to find the program on the basis of the memory of the picture viewed last time. In the case of performing zapping in order from the highest preference of the viewer under the circumstance in which the number of programs is large, the viewer is not aware of the channel number or the title of the program so much. Consequently, it is expected that such a problem is becoming more conspicuous in future.